By

July 2, 2003

Snoozing guards at Los Alamos, missing vials of plutonium oxide… Yes, the headlines in late June were announcing “security lapses” again at national labs and nuclear weapons plants. It seems that an Al Qaeda terrorist could roll up to the gates of the Sandia National Laboratories, haul out an RPG and catch America napping yet again. Sounding all brisk and efficient, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham acknowledged a recent critical report from the General Accounting Office and has taken standard evasive action, in the form of that whiskered veteran of bureaucratic ass-covering, the “security review.” At Sandia, Dave Nokes, vice president for national security, was picked as the sacrificial goat and forced to resign.

The mess at Los Alamos has had its humorous side. Lillian Anaya, a Los Alamos equipment buyer, thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But the number she called had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, so she wound up buying a Mustang instead–with government money. Or so say Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who recently cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing (though I still don’t quite understand why she got the Mustang).

Let’s get back to the larger picture and the obvious question: Whom do they think they’re kidding? To talk about terrorist opportunity offered by slack security just at Los Alamos and Livermore is like saying that hijackers would try to board planes only at Logan and Atlanta. There’s scarcely a state in the union that hasn’t got tanks or barrels of nuclear waste, or decommissioned reactors saturated with radioactive materials. Most Interstates carry trucks hauling mobile Chernobyls around the country.

We’re talking sixty years of US nuclear weapons research, development, testing and production, which has left us with staggering amounts of some of the most dangerous substances on the planet. And that’s not even to mention the nuclear utilities.

The “security” scene doesn’t change rapidly when it comes to nuclear materials and waste. All you can do is try to store radioactivity safely and wait for the millennia to roll by until it naturally decays. But of course it’s mostly stored in extremely unsafe and vulnerable conditions.

You live in Texas? There’s the Pantex plant, producing nuclear weapons. In Colorado? You’ve got Rocky Flats. Flee to the clean breezes of the Pacific Northwest? Whoa! Here’s the Hanford nuclear reservation, with 177 tanks, each containing a million gallons of radioactive waste, of which sixty-seven are known to have leaked at some point. How about Idaho? Camp in the hills, cheek by jowl with the militia holdouts. Sorry, you’ve got the National Engineering lab up the road, where intensely radioactive waste was converted to dry form for “permanent” storage nearly forty years ago but now has to be extracted and repackaged.

Head for the heartland, and you find the Fernald plant in Ohio, whose career history includes cumulative “release” of at least 500 tons of toxic uranium dust, kept secret for many years. Turn south into Kentucky, and there, across the horizon, is the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Watch where you drink. A 1,300-acre underground plume of Technetium-99 (a uranium-decay product) is migrating toward the Ohio River at the rate of several inches a day. The DOE has identified more than 5,700 such plumes of various kinds of contamination under or near its sites across the country.

Go to the densely populated research triangle of North Carolina. Walk along the railroad tracks, and in the end you come to the Shearon Harris plant, a nuclear power generating station where they take spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants, owned by Progress Energy, storing them in four densely packed pools filled with circulating cold water to keep the waste from heating up. They’re the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the country.

Even the Department of Homeland Security acknowledges Shearon Harris as a ripe terror target. If your Al Qaeda operative found a way to interrupt the flow of cooling water, you’d have unstoppable pool fires and possibly a plant meltdown, with consequent peril for 2 million people residing in that part of the state. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reckons that on a best-case basis there’s a 1 in 100 chance of a pool fire. And needless to say, there have been scores of terrifying screw-ups at Shearon Harris.

Get the picture? Shearon Harris is a really dangerous place, and if you read all the security assessments and reports of past lapses, plus Tom Ridge’s bleak warning, no doubt monitored by America’s foes, you can see that–as with Hanford and all the other nuclear waste dumps–it wouldn’t take much for a dedicated little crew of terrorists to inflict monstrous disaster, disaster that might well come anyway through native incompetence, without Al Qaeda having to lift a finger.

And don’t forget, we’re heading for a new phase in the itinerary to Armageddon. The DOE now proposes building a new plant to manufacture 450 plutonium “pits” (nuclear triggers) a year. Function? To arm the mini-nuke bunker-busters scheduled under the Bush Administration’s new nuclear strategy. Los Alamos is bidding for it, as is Carlsbad, New Mexico; Savannah River in South Carolina; the Nevada Test Site; and Pantex.

Since the government has been doing its best down the years to damp troublesome public discussion of these dangers, concerned citizens should take advantage of the current sensitivity to weapons of mass destruction, which places like Shearon Harris most certainly are. There are dedicated groups across the United States that have been active for decades on issues of nuclear safety, and have generated the information offered here.

Now that he’s stepped down from his UN job, why not have a nonprofit foundation invite Hans Blix and a few other veteran inspectors to start touring the United States, assessing the risks posed by WMDs here? They could make well-publicized “surprise inspections,” hold hearings, take evidence from local groups, issue public reports, build up pressure on the Department of Homeland Security to force the government to get serious about containing America’s gravest and most deadly internal threat.

Alexander Cockburn Alexander Cockburn, The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language.
After two years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, he worked at the New Left Review and The New Statesman, and co-edited two Penguin volumes, on trade unions and on the student movement.
A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years for The Village Voice about the press and politics. Since then he has contributed to many publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal (where he had a regular column from 1980 to 1990), as well as alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

He has written "Beat the Devil" since 1984.

He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St Clair, of the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch(http://www.counterpunch.org) which have a substantial world audience. In 1987 he published a best-selling collection of essays, Corruptions of Empire, and two years later co-wrote, with Susanna Hecht, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (both Verso). In 1995 Verso also published his diary of the late 80s, early 90s and the fall of Communism, The Golden Age Is In Us. With Ken Silverstein he wrote Washington Babylon; with Jeffrey St. Clair he has written or coedited several books including: Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press; The Politics of Anti-Semitism; Imperial Crusades; Al Gore, A User's Manual; Five Days That Shook the World; and A Dime's Worth of Difference, about the two-party system in America.